Elaine Stritch’s Long Goodbye

On Friday evening at the Café Carlyle, before the second-to-last performance of “Elaine Stritch at the Carlyle: Movin’ Over and Out,” Stritch’s farewell show, the crowd was settling in, ordering steak and lobster and Manhattans. The room was packed with theatricality: a woman with a crown of white-blond hair and a high lacy collar and the bearing of Snow White’s stepmother; men in fashionable suits, some with dramatic hair; a woman with a fascinator made of red feathers; Mandy Patinkin, bearded and serious; Michael Riedel, the Post critic, seated in the shadows to one side of the stage.

When the lights went down, Stritch’s accompanist, Rob Bowman, explained what to expect. “This is a very different kind of night,” he said. Stritch, everyone knew, was moving out of the Carlyle Hotel, where she’s lived for the past several years, and out of New York, and going home to Michigan, which she left in 1942. At eighty-eight, she felt it was time; she’s diabetic, and has memory problems, and had a hip replacement, and eye trouble. But her Stritchiness, by God, is still here. Bowman explained that this wasn’t a typical well-rehearsed cabaret show—the Times had tactfully made that clear in its Wednesday review, as if patrons had come for a night of showstoppers, and left confused. “Elaine was asked to do a little something for you all before she leaves for Michigan later in the month. She wants to say hello, goodbye, and everything in between. She wants to come and have a visit. Ladies and Gentlemen, let’s have a visit with Elaine Stritch!”

To wild applause, cheering, and a “Brava!” Stritch, cane in hand, made her way toward the stage as if determinedly fording a stream. She clambered onstage, yelling something feisty; people laughed. In the spotlight, she turned toward the applause. She was wearing her signature outfit: a long white man’s dress shirt, a black vest, black tights, nothing resembling pants. Her shirt buttons were shiny, like diamonds. She bowed, waved, clasped her hands together like a woman in love.

“Isn’t this fantastic, what a star I am?” she yelled. The Carlyle went wild. “I mention I’m going home, and I’m a star immediately! This used to happen with my boyfriends—as soon I’d say ‘I gotta go home now’ they fell in love.” Laugh. “Hard to get. What is it about that? And the newspaper does a picture of you with Tom Hanks, and you’re overnight a star.” The Times piece had featured a picture of Stritch and Hanks greeting each other after the Tuesday show, and another that showed her smiling at tables that included Liza Minnelli, Tony Bennett, and Bernadette Peters. “I went through so many emotions tonight that I’m a wreck,” she said, her voice breaking. The audience cried out in sympathy.

“I am, I’m a wreck! I’ve been up in that room, and I said, you know? Being a Catholic, I always give myself a problem. Sacred Heart Convent girls always give up something. Their prime time is Lent. The harder your life is, oh boy, you’re really making it.” She did a little riff about Catholicism and self-denial and guilt. “We used to go to downtown Detroit and get so drunk on Easter Saturday afternoon. And then you’d go to the cathedral and we’d say, Oh, I did it, I made a total fool out of myself, that’s what I did.” A man ordered a glass of wine, too loudly. “Who’s talking while I’m telling these jewels? It’s just selfish!” Applause. “There’s something about it that makes sense, Lent. You give something up and everything’s more joyful.” She told more of the Catholicism story, her mood hovering between elegiac and saucy. “We haven’t even done the opening yet. That’s how casual this show is. Should we do the opening?”

“Yes!” the crowd said happily.

“I wanted to find something that was kind of corny, and kind of talked about my home town, out there near Ohio. It’s not Ohio. Otherwise I would have sung ‘Why, oh why, oh why, oh, did I ever leave Ohio’ ”—from “Wonderful Town.” “But there’s very few melodious songs about Detroit.”

On top of the piano, there were two glasses: water and what looked like orange juice, separating a bit, each with a napkin on top. A vase of pink roses sat beside them.

“This song we’re going to start out slow, so when it gets ricky-ticky, it’ll pay off.” Bowman played and the vase of roses jiggled. Stritch half sang, half growled:

How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm After they’ve seen Par-ee? How you gonna keep ’em Away from Broadway? Jazzin’ around, And maybe paintin’ the town, How you gonna keep ’em away from harm? That’s the mystery. How the hell you gonna tell a rake from a plow? And who the deuce is gonna parlez-voose—by God!—with a cow?

She sounded convincing—she truly couldn’t imagine who the deuce would parlez-voose with a cow. Then it got ricky-ticky. “After they’ve seen—you ready, Rob?—Par-ee.” Bowman was ready, and picked up the pace. She sang it again, in full Stritch blast-off mode. By God! With a cow!

Mid-anecdote about her encounter with a “courageous broad” who’d come to the show the night before—Joan Rivers—Stritch introduced her friend Hunter, a handsome young blond fellow, who was standing by the waiters toward the bar. (He is the actor Hunter Ryan Herdlicka, who appeared with her in “A Little Night Music,” in 2009, and can be seen in the new documentary, “Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me.”) “This is my friend who’s helping me get out of the Carlyle. First of all, we’ve got to talk to a lot of people. And say, This”—the farewell week—“is what we’re doing instead of paying.” This line got a good laugh, and clapping and whistling. “So, maybe, if they hold me over for a few extra shows, then I’ll tell you how I got away with it. I don’t think they want me to tell you, but I want to share it.” She shifted tone again, from irascible to sombre. “On the serious side of life, there is no way with getting away with one dime.”

As the visit went on, there were several such changes in tone, and the fans were with her for most of them. She said that earlier in the week she’d thought of opening the show with the line “Hey! New pope, eh?” Then she sang a bit of “Down Argentina Way,” ending it with “You’ll want to stay—olé—or move to Rome, or simply fuck around!” This went over big. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s do all openers tonight!” she said.

What wasn’t clear to everyone right away was that Stritch had to be in control of the room. She didn’t like when other people made remarks—not just about appetizers or wine but, for example, Riedel’s suggestion of a joke, known to be her favorite (“Golf! Golf, sweetheart!”), when she was looking for one. She couldn’t recognize him in the darkness, and wanted him to pipe down.

She also didn’t like it when people messed with the mood she created; this happened, rather painfully, during the Sondheim section. She is, of course, famous for singing his songs, and has made them her own—“The Ladies Who Lunch,” from “Company”; “I’m Still Here,” from “Follies”—but finds them demanding, especially now. “You can’t get better than him. But let me tell you how hard he is to sing, honest to God! What’s that art school—it’s like being locked in the john at Juilliard!” She first met Sondheim, she said, at an elegant party on Park Avenue decades ago, full of rich people. “They said, ‘Elaine, sing!’ They used to ask me to sing and make ’em laugh at parties.” Sondheim was to accompany her, and asked her to sing her favorite song; she had said that it was Rodgers and Hart’s “He Was Too Good to Me.”

“And Sondheim said, ‘Holy Toledo, Elaine, that’s my favorite too.’ And I sat down next to Steve Sondheim, and I dedicated it to him, as I do tonight, with all my heart,” Stritch said. She sat down on the stool. The room was quiet—focussed and grateful. “Guess who made my stay in New York twice as joyful? Stephen Sondheim.” Bowman played the piano, and she sang. “He was too good to me.” It was beautiful, tender, sad. But a few lines later, by accident, instead of “I was his queen to him,” she sang, “He was a queen—I was a queen too,” and got laughs. The laughter felt generous enough—the familiar camp laugh of the musical-theatre crowd, a crowd made comfortable by the intimacy of the café and the love in the room—but she hadn’t meant the joke, and the laugh upset her. “That was unintentional!” she said. People kept laughing, thinking that she was having fun, but she wasn’t. “I don’t play dirty, and that’s not very nice. Get it out of your lives, it’s not going to do you any good.” She sang again. But the next line was “I was gay now.” A man seated to the side of the piano—Riedel—laughed. She turned toward him. “Are you having fun?” she said acidly. “That’s another one you picked up.” She sang more lines, back on track, and that was nice too. “I’m so sorry that that happened,” she said to the room, as Bowman played more notes on the piano. “But let it happen with love and respect, and not bullshit like that.” The crowd was startled—weren’t we all having a good time?—and sorry. People clapped to show their support. When Stritch sang again, the mood was good. Then she did something lovely, weaving some “Porgy and Bess” into the Rodgers and Hart—“He was too good to me. Morning time and evening time, summertime and wintertime, he was too good to me.” The song came to a delicate, gentle conclusion.

“While we’re on the subject of the dignity and the warmth and the love that’s right under a very thin-skinned breast, is Stephen Sondheim,” Stritch said. “He’s one of the best, if not the best. He’s just adorable. Mean as shit.” She told a story about a rehearsal of “Company,” in which he was not mean as shit: he wrote her a note that said “You have turned a saloon song into a piece of theatre.” He knew she needed praise, and she appreciated that.

“This is the kind of show where we don’t know what is going to happen,” she said. “My assistant Hunter said, ‘Look what I stole from the Carlyle!’ And I said, ‘Just because you live on the West Side…’ ” He’d taken Carlyle stationery, and on it they wrote prompts for her favorite jokes and stories, and they put them into a bowl that audience members would pick from. She announced that we’d be doing this later.

“Let’s call this a concert, it’ll make us all feel better,” she said. She sang Sondheim’s “Everybody Says Don’t.” Mandy Patinkin leaned forward, resting his chin on his hand, watching her. “Everyone says don’t walk on the grass,” she sang, and clenched her fist. This song was made for her; she knew the words and sang them with pizzazz. “I say try! Make a noise!”

Then came the jokes—Jesus playing golf—and the funny stories. She sang Cole Porter’s paternity-themed spoof, “You’re the Pop.”—“Cole Porter would send himself up,” she said (“My mistake was getting plastered / What a break for the little bastard”)—and shared stories about Ruth Donnelly and Joan Crawford; chasing Jane Fonda down the street; a cabbie mistaking her for Phyllis Diller; drinking twenty-seven drinks with Bela Lugosi; and a kind, recent phone call from Lauren Bacall. All hilarious, or hilariously told.

“What’s the next one?” she said. Mandy Patinkin had a piece of paper in his hand. “Pigeon story!” he called out.

“This is my second favorite!” she said. This was about two drunks outside the Sherry-Netherland and a pigeon that leaves a “plotz” on one’s hand. The punch line was “By the time you get back here with that john paper, that pigeon’ll be miles away.” She said this with a drunk’s sad incredulity. A man at a front table laughed heartily. Stritch smiled and shook his hand. “You have a great laugh,” she said.

She told a story about Mae West and the Queen of England, and then sang one last song: “All My Tomorrows.” “It says what I want to say to you. So I’m just going to flub through it, and we’ll make it together,” she said. She gave Bowman a kiss. “Today, I may not have a thing at all except just a dream or two.” She paused. “Where are the words, so I don’t have to struggle?” Bowman gave her a lyric sheet and her glasses.

“Your glasses,” he said.

She put her glasses on. “Ah, life settles in. O.K. Now, I’m free as a bird!” Everyone laughed and clapped. “Let’s see how many I know.”

“All my tomorrows are meant for you,” she sang, and clapped her hand over her mouth. She sang, and dug into each line. “No one knows better than I that life keeps passing you by. That’s fate! You just wait!” She wiggled her fingers. “Christ! Just wait!” About halfway through the song, she chucked the lyrics sheet onto the piano and went for it. “As long as I’ve got arms to cling at all, it’s you I’ll be clinging to…. And all my bright tomorrows belong to you.”

Stritch got a wild standing ovation: minutes of cheering and applause and whistling and pictures. “Oh, that makes me happy,” she said. But she couldn’t just be sentimental: “We gotta get some more jokes in the bowl.”

Someone said there were more.

“Save them for tomorrow,” she said.

Stritch managed her way offstage, with help and her cane, and half-disappeared into the river of fans, who were on their feet. “Nice to see you! You look like a good-looking Ethel Barrymore,” she said to someone.

“End of an era, in my world,” Riedel said, watching her go.

A minute later, it was clear that Patinkin had found her in the crowd. “Oh, Mandy, Mandy, Mandy!” she said. “Do you know what he’s whispering to me?” Someone else gave her flowers. “Yes, my darling. Flowers? From who? Who are you? A fan?” And then she was gone.

Photograph, of Elaine Stritch at the Carlyle, by Todd Heisler/The New York Times/Redux.